Overnight Success: Vanta
Christina Cacioppo taught herself to code after leaving venture capital at USV because she realized the future belonged to people who build. She'd wake up at 5:45 AM to manually send "automated" compliance emails to Vanta's first customers, testing what worked before writing any automation code.
The security compliance space in 2018? Nobody cared. Startups didn't need SOC 2. VCs told her the market was too small. She spent six months interviewing companies, building spreadsheet prototypes for Segment and Front, doing compliance work manually while pretending it was software.
She pivoted from security checklists that didn't work to compliance certification that did. Built a meeting recorder and voice assistant that both failed before landing on Vanta. Her first 600 customers signed up without a real website. Just a llama and an opt-in form.
Now Vanta is worth $4.15 billion and serves 12,000+ companies.
Christina will talk about:
Why she left leading product at Dropbox Paper to solve a problem nobody knew they had
The meeting recorder and voice assistant failures before finding Vanta
How Segment became her first customer through a spreadsheet prototype
Going through YC with barely any funding left before everything clicked
Waiting to raise Series A at $10M ARR instead of $1M because "if investors were happy at $1M, they'd be ecstatic with more"
What it was really like for a non-technical founder to convince the world that security compliance could be automated when everyone said it was impossible.
Limited to 30-50 founders. No slides. No script.
04:30 pm: Doors open
05:00 pm: Fireside chat starts
06:00 pm: Office tour + mingling
06:30 pm: Door shut
Part of the Overnight Success event series - see other events at overnightfpv.com